


She's Long Gone With Her Red Shoes On

by Rednaelo



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bittersweet, Canonical Character Death, Drabble, Father-Daughter Relationship, Freeform, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-09-20 21:29:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9516977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rednaelo/pseuds/Rednaelo
Summary: Jack dug a hole in the ground.





	

**Author's Note:**

> shrugs to high heaven
> 
> idk it wanted to come out.
> 
> -Bec

Cremation was the standard when you lived on space stations.  Donation to scientific study, maybe, if you cared about that sort of thing.  Rich people could afford to have their bodies preserved perfectly and set on display in high-security mausoleums.  Or have their ashes compressed into diamonds to be given as heirlooms.  Inheritances of precious, sparkling corpses.  And whatever curses came with them.

Jack dug a hole in the ground.  He used his hands and a shovel and dug Eve’s grave from dawn when she died ‘till noon, when it was longer and deeper than his height.  Angel was crying.  Screaming.  Her wailing was like waves of the sun lapping over the scorched cells of Jack’s skin.  It soaked into his ears and deluged his head.  Angel needed fed. 

Eve needed a coffin. 

Jack jumped up, his arm catching on the lip of the grave, shovel in his blistered, dusty fist.  He hauled himself up and left the shovel behind.  It still took two hands to open the door.  It still screeched something terrible – they never did get the chance to pick up any oil to grease the hinges.  Jack shut out the daylight with a shove of his aching shoulders.  Angel cried, louder now, and the part of Jack that wanted to hush her gently –soothe his baby girl with words she didn’t even understand – that part of Jack was suffocatingly silent. 

He stood in the stale shadows of their home and listening to his firstborn (onlyborn, beloved child, mother-killer) sobbing and noticed that the sheet he had covered Eve with had flies on it: skittering, black flecks on bloodied linen.  Jack watched the path of one errant insect as it crawled up Eve’s stomach and over her breast.  Still as any stone, Jack had no one to panic to, no one to yell at when the realization caught up with him.  Eve hadn’t weaned Angel yet.  She was going to starve. 

Put her in the ground too, that’d take care of everything.

Jack blinked the thought away because it was useless. 

Angel continued to cry.  Jack buried his wife in the earth of Pandora, washed his hands, and filled up a baby bottle with water.  They laid together on the couch, dirt still under Jack’s nails and blood on his boots while Angel suckled at her bottle until her little blue eyes began to close and more of the water ended up drooled on Jack’s shirt than in her tummy.

She slept on his chest, Jack’s arm tucked under her rump and his hand against her back, thumbing circles between her bitty shoulders while he felt the static that had muted the world evaporate from his head. 

Eve had no coffin and no marker for her grave save for the mound of dirt that would be leveled with time gone by.  But Jack had a bike in the garage and money enough to buy something as cheap as baby formula.  Not the most common commodity on Pandora but certainly available.

Jack let himself sleep, telling himself he deserved it after the day he had.


End file.
